Meme floating around the IT-analyst-o-sphere: “bring
your own laptop.” Basically treat the employee's
laptop as you would treat the employees's pants:
require it, pay the employee enough to buy it,
and provide the infrastructure that works with it,
but that's all.
About bloomin' time. I use my personal iBook for work purposes all the time, but IT policies at work prevent me from being able to link in any meaningful way with the work servers while I'm out of the office. The only solution would be to carry two laptops with me, one for work stuff and one for home stuff*.
The sort of approach suggested above would bring businesses' IT policies into line with the realities of life in the early 21st century and would really make life much, much easier.
Technorati Tags: it, mobile working, technology, work, workplace
April 25, 2006 5:01 PM | Reply
Fine for you virus-free Mac/Linux types, but having been an IT admin, I'd be very loath to let someone plug an unknown windows box into my network when I didn't even know if it had anti-virus on it...
April 25, 2006 6:08 PM | Reply
But isn't that classic "tail wagging the dog" behaviour from a support service?
"This enhancement to employees' working practices would make life harder for me, so I'm not having it."?
There must be a solution that's viable to that problem - server-based scanning at the point of network connection.
"Hang on - I'll just log you in once I'm sure you haven't done anything stupid while you've been away."
April 25, 2006 6:26 PM | Reply
There's undoubtably a middle-ground to be had - and I believe that Windows Vista has the facility in it to check that there are up-to-date anti-virus/anti-malware utilities installed before they allow the machine to connect fully to the network.
But there's no current way of checking that a machine is 'safe' before letting it onto your network, as far as I know - and as IS people are responsible for making sure that data isn't lost and that service is maintained, control over what machines are allowed access is considered a price worth paying, most of the time.
April 25, 2006 7:16 PM | Reply
I think that's an acceptable position for the time being, but one that will be less and less tenable as the months and years pass. There's a generation coming into the workforce now that will find our current attitudes to business technology laughable.
April 25, 2006 8:07 PM | Reply
That's probably because business technology _is_ largely laughable. It's been largely hacked together and while it pretty much works most of the time, the infrastructure really isn't in place for the way that businesses actually work.
I reckon we're 10-15 years away from networked systems that really work smoothly and reliably in a coherent way.